Take Your Time

All day long I felt like I knew the answer. I had the perfect blog post in mind and I had to have the right image for it. I started looking this morning over coffee, at 6:15 p.m. I just sunk back in the chair and gave up. I am very particular about the images I use but I couldn’t find that one that simply had to go with that post. I stopped, finally, after hours of searching, and then the phrase “Take your time” came to me and I made my own graphic. It is nothing fancy, but it is enough.

I have been off kilter for at least 2 days now and it has worried me. I needed to do something to hurry up and get right again. This is just about the silliest, most senseless thing you can do. You can’t rush the processing of feelings and emotions, and for me, with several mental health issues and a handful of pills I have to take each day, pushing myself that hard, a little, I’m sad to say, bipolary in nature, won’t get me anywhere except curled up in a chair hiding under a blanket with my pugs, and while snuggling with the pugs is always a good thing allowing myself to curl up and disappear is just something I won’t let myself do anymore. If you are lost there’s no way to rush being found. You have to take your time.

To me it’s like, well, there’s a very particular thing I have in mind. I am in a place that is between asking the question and receiving the answer, you know, like when you ask the Magic 8 Ball a question and then turn it over and slowly, ever so slowly, up from the murky depths comes the answer. There is no way to rush the answer coming, you just have to wait. I have, for all intents and purposes, asked a question. Well, I asked more than one. One I needn’t have bothered asking because there is no answer, it is a rhetorical question, I asked it out loud expecting the universe to finally send me the answer I’ve waited for for 11 years. There is no answer, just the knowing that it’s time to let go, and it just makes my heart ache. Then there is this question that is roughly formed in my mind, “What is the purpose of this 365 Day Experiment?” You see when I started this project 66 days ago I had the firm belief that something was going to happen as a result of me having blogged for the year. I wasn’t sure exactly what the answer was supposed to be but I had almost a prescient sense that the thing coming would be almost magical, a meant-to-be thing, and all I had to do was show up here every day and it would unfold naturally. I suppose that might be happening but I’ve become too focused on the possible outcome and not on the journey itself. Today I let go of the outcome, and returned to embracing the journey. That will require constant, steady action, I will have to slow down, breath deeply, and take my time. But then the shy little question surfaced, something that flutters around in my heart from time to time but which I have given up hope, almost given up hope, of ever happening.

Today when I started searching for that perfect image I wrote down, in the subject line for this post, “Will I Ever Have Anyone To Hold My Hand Again?” I am actually blushing madly seeing the words here in black and white. But I do wonder, and there’s a kind of melancholy nearly engulfing me as I wonder this again, would it ever be possible for someone to love someone like me? I am 63 1/2 years old, I struggle with mental health issues, am scarred by childhood abuse that left me fragile for most of my adult life. I lost all of my financial security after the house fire that took Dragonfly Cottage. I don’t imagine I’m a catch, but that doesn’t keep my heart from dreaming. I’m mostly okay alone, but these last years, where I have always craved solitude, I find myself getting lonely more and more often. And I am a person who loves being in love, loves doting on her partner, longs to have a hand to hold and to be held. It’s tenderness I miss, and knowing that I matter to someone as they do to me. Having someone to have coffee with in the morning. Someone who looks at you in that way and you know you belong, you know you are at home with that person, wherever you are as long as you’re together you are home.

Oh dear, I guess I shouldn’t let myself go there, but I suppose you are never too old to long to be loved. I’ve lived alone so long now, since 1999, that I can’t imagine how I would logistically fit another person into my world, and that does scare me, but what scares me more, or I guess makes me very sad, is to think that I will never be loved again. It’s a bit of a quandary, but am I wrong to hope, at this late date, that someone might love me? I just don’t know, but the heart wants what it wants and it won’t be quiet.

Mostly I’m fine alone with the pugs, we have our routines, I love them so much and they bring me so much joy. Anyone who loved me would have to love them too, but is there room for another person in my life? I can’t imagine how it would happen, I rarely even leave the house. Well, I guess now that I’ve brought it up again I can let it go, for awhile at least. But that young-at-heart romantic in me just leaps about and has so much love to give it’s hard to keep her quiet. I guess we’ll just have to wait to see what the future holds, she and I. We will just have to take our time and watch as the thousand petals of the lotus open before us. What is the prize at the center, the happy life I imagine, what will it look like? It’s too soon to tell.

I hope I’ve not said too much. I’m feeling really shy right now, and as though I’ve embarrassed myself. But the perhaps sad truth is that there’s no stopping me, these things just will come out, I don’t lie or hide things well, so I’ve said it and that’s that.

But I do know that what I said at the start is true, I must take my time, we all must take our time, the amazing, joyful surprise will be worth the wait, I just know that that is true. It is, right? I surely hope so…